Thank god August is over. The calendar and weather may still say summer, but with today’s arrival of George Clooney in The American, Movie Fall has begun and not a minute too soon. In order of interest, here’s the Top 10 followed by an additional 34 in release order: True Grit (12/25). Joel and Ethan (read…)

I finally caught up with the SXSW Film Festival award winning That Evening Sun the other night and you can check out the latest trailer yourself over at Apple. Brought to life by an Oscar-worthy turn from the great Hal Holbrook, Scott Teems’ adaptation of William Gay’s modern southern gothic short story is a rich (read…)

Coming soon: Robert Stones’ upcoming doc Earth Days, an engaging and entertaining retrospective of the modern environmental movement – a look at how the movement started, where it’s been and where it’s headed.

SnagFilms celebrates its first birthday with SummerFest, a series of week-long premieres of documentaries that haven’t screened in theaters or on TV. SummerFest kicks off this Friday 7/24 with Jonathan Bricklin’s The Entrepreneur. Executive produced by Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me, the most popular of the 800+ docs that SnagFilms featured in its first year), The Entrepreneur tells the story of Malcolm Bricklin, the filmmaker’s father and the wheeler-dealer who successfully brought the Subaru and the Yugo to America.

Via: Press Release Maya Entertainment would like you to know that this summer they’re teaming up with Blockbuster to bring a curated slate of eight Latino-themed films to eight major US markets. The series begins July 17th in Los Angeles and it runs through September 10th hitting New York, Chicago, Washington DC, Miami, San Francisco, (read…)

A look at the upcoming film The Stoning of Soraya M., the true story of an Iranian wife who is wrongfully accused of adultery by her husband and stoned to death. It’s playing at the Los Angeles Film Festival on June 20 and it opens in limited release on June 26.

Tenzin Zopa searches for the Unmistaken Child It’s worth noting for residents of Los Angeles that the terrific documentary Unmistaken Child opens here today and that the president of the Tibetan Association of Southern California will speak at Laemmle’s Sunset 5 after the 7:10 screening tonight and again tomorrow June 13th. Nati Baratz’s documentary tells (read…)

Get ready for lots of “Keyla Espinoza is a Basterd” headlines After drawing inspiration from Italian cult-genre filmmaker Enzo G. Castellari to make his current film Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino has apparently given some of that inspiration in return. The 70-year-old Castellari has turned up on the Croisette with a promo reel for his first (read…)

Eli Roth and Brad Pitt get one more Nazi scalp in Inglourious Basterds After mostly shooting blanks in May, June and July, the summer is saved as August arrives bearing the most anticipated wide-release movie of season as far as Living in Cinema is concerned: Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. Better late than never, I guess. (read…)

We’ve been wondering what David Lynch was up to besides executive producing Werner Herzog’s “guerrilla-style digital video shoot” My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done and this morning Vulture notes this promotional video for Interview Project, premiering at DavidLynch.com on June 1. What’s it all about? Well, it looks like Lynch sent his minions (read…)

May and June kick summer off with a yawn. Can July rally to offer some of the sizzle the season is known for? Our opinion: no. Thank god for indie cinema. July 1 Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs. Is there any point to me complaining that dinosaurs were extinct long before mammoths and sloths (read…)

Jude Law, Robert Downey Jr. and Rachel McAdams in Sherlock Holmes USA Today’s Susan Wloszczyna visited the Brooklyn set of Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes and came away with some new photos plus re-assertions by the cast and filmmaker that the film will be an action-oriented update for 2009 yet remain respectful to Sir Arthur Conan (read…)

Michael Bay’s Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Stinking up multiplexes June 24. After a few cinematic bright spots in May, the summer wide release calendar takes a dump in June. Unless Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro goes wide, there is little worth mentioning beyond the mild hope that Harold Ramis can capture a little of his (read…)

Jeremie Renier, Juliette Binoche and Charles Berling in Olivier Assayas’ Summer Hours Most of the movies I see in a given year settle into an amorphous middle ground somewhere between “pretty good” and “kinda bad.” A smaller number coalesce around the more extreme fringes of “awful” and “great” while in a good year there is (read…)

You can approach summer with its seemingly endless string of big budget sequels and movies aimed at the id of 13-year-olds in a few different ways. You can close your eyes and bite the pillow praying for it to just end, you can ignore it, you can complain about it, or you can do what (read…)

Though summer doesn’t officially begin until June 20, the summer movie season begins in May. Sadly, as an unreformed slacker, I procrastinated the annual Living in Cinema summer forecast and now the first weekend of the season is only a day away. Therefore, part one of this year’s column will also stand in for the (read…)

There are about 547 ways this thing could go horribly and embarrassingly wrong, but news that Nic Cage and John Carpenter might make a prison break film together warms my heart. I can’t remember the last time Carpenter made a film I really liked and Cage has always been spotty, but there’s something about this (read…)

Filming was supposed to begin in mid-August on Ridley Scott’s Nottingham starring Russell Crowe as the Sherriff, but The Hollywood Reporter‘s Gregg Kilday says the film has been put on hold due to “script concerns, location logistics and the current labor unrest.” In a statement from Universal, the studio claims that everyone remains committed to (read…)

“Mr. Moore, will you sign my DVD of Watchmen Babies?” Anne Thompson spoke to Zack Snyder prior to the Watchmen panel at Comic-Con on Friday and, though the panel itself sounded like a snooze (read about it here if you must), Anne dug up some interesting information. A year or so ago when Watchmen first (read…)

High school senior Hannah Bailey in American Teen In 2005, filmmaker Nanette Burstein (The Kid Stays in the Picture) filmed the lives of five Warsaw Indiana High School seniors over the course of ten months. She then narrowed down 1000 hours of footage and the result is American Teen, a documentary that traces every up (read…)

In brighter indie news, the report we previously passed along that Sony Pictures Classics was close to picking up Charlie Kaufman’s Cannes pic Synecdoche, New York was confirmed by the company today and a release is currently planned for October. I can’t wait for the real movie season to start. How about you? Source: Variety

Philippe Petit is a Man on Wire Because the wide releases are mainly of niche interest this week, I’m starting with the much more appetizing limited releases. Man on Wire. (NY. Opens wider 8/8) Who’d have thought a documentary about a man who walked a tightrope between the towers of the World Trade Center in (read…)

Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, one of the more anticipated films around the LiC offices, may soon be picked up by Sony Pictures Classics for distribution in the US. The Hollywood Reporter’s Gregg Goldstein and Steven Zeitchik describe the process as being in “advanced negotiations.” Normally this is where I’d tell you what the film (read…)

Screen Daily’s Mike Goodridge reports that Dutch director Paul Verhoeven (Black Book, RoboCop) is attached to direct a film based on the acclaimed World War II memoir The Forgotten Soldier by Frenchman Guy Sajer. As a teenager, Sajer was recruited into the German army and sent to the eastern front. The controversial Verhoeven is already (read…)

Seven days in the making…it’s the Weekend Forecast. Here’s where I just get out of the way for the big one. In bat-theaters everywhere: The Dark Knight. In order for this movie to live up to the hype, it’s going to have to buy me dinner and give me a lap dance, but not necessarily (read…)

Geoffrey Macnab reports for The UK’s Screen Daily that Alex Cox has finished writing the screenplay and is looking for studio backing for Repo Chick, a return to his iconic cult film Repo Man which mixed post-apocalyptic science fiction with early-‘80s LA flavored punk angst and served it up with Cox’s unique brand of deadpan humor. The (read…)

The Wackness is the dopeness Friday is a major US holiday and the release calendar is all mucked up so I’m rolling out the Weekend Forecast a day early again this week. First up is the only wide release which actually opened on Tuesday for those of you keeping score at home: Hancock (7/1). Just what (read…)

Moviefone has the new James Bond trailer in HD Quicktime. Click here to see the Low-D version. There’s something about James Bond that’s connected directly to the part of my brain that’s still 12 or 13 years old so please forgive my continual plugging of this movie.

Eve and WALL•E – Just a couple of crazy robots in love Thursday brings us to another Weekend Forecast. Prospects are certainly better than last week. WALL•E. I’m taking a break from the tail end of the LA Film Festival just for opening night of the latest from the fine folks at Pixar. I’ve said (read…)